school classes of small people. Still it is a little surprising to be told that "Eli was a very old man, and Eli was very sick, and Eli brought up Samuel." Confusion of sound, of course, accounts for such statements as the admiring comment of the restless youth on Joshua: "Joshua was a man who commanded his son to stand still, and he did it"; by the side of which might perhaps be placed the answer given by a little girl in a Sunday-school to an acquaintance of the writer. "What did Samuel anoint Saul with?" "Please, teacher, beer, teacher." It was an answer which was puzzling, especially as the child's mother was a very respectable woman, who used to hear her children repeat their Sunday-school lesson, until the solution dawned on the teacher that the confusion sprang up from the consonance of oil, ale, and "ile."

It is no doubt not always easy to frame a series of questions which a child ought to be able to answer, if properly taught, but surely there are some questions which are often asked, and yet ought not to be asked, just because they compel children to think about things which do not belong to the child's kingdom. Could anything be more needless or thoughtless -if it is not morbid-than to ask a child to write an answer on paper to the question, "Are you afraid of dying?" Yet it seems to be a question commonly asked, and the answers recorded by Mr. Burn supply the best criticism possible as to its value. question was put to a large school, and the large majority of the children answered-what other answer should any bright life give? "Yes." Twenty-one of the children-all of them boys-did not answer the question at all; sixtytwo, of whom seven were girls, wrote "No." But some of them gave the queerest of reasons. The happiest and straightest, "I am not afraid of dying,

The

because I am healthy, and have no disease," compares not badly with more deeply thought out philosophies; but clearly the question gave an extra twist to two or three minds too young to brood over slow illness and the horror of burials. "I fear death, because it might come at night and pull my feet," was one of the answers given by a little girl; and even that answer does not imagine such terrors as must have gone round and round in the brain of the poor child who wrote: "I am afraid of death, because it is so ugly, and one day Bernard went to bury a dead person, and it got hold of Bernard and gave him a kiss." That last sentence, with the sudden, natural use of the word "it," sums up the fright of a thousand black stories of lunacy. It is the genius of madness. But is it the business of a teacher to encourage such imaginings?

Written answers to written questions, and spoken answers to spoken questions, do not, of course, exhaust the funds of wisdom and wondering—and, for that matter, deep and valuable teaching-which belong to the mind of a child. They are worth preserving, for all that, as they are preserved in these two collections. Still, we do not know whether the most interesting of all collections of instances of the growth of a child's wisdom-which is just the growth of a man's mindwould not be one which recorded and collected sayings and doings, not necessarily laughable, or queer, but essentially characteristic of the changing years of a young child's life. What would be the view, for instance, taken by the average child of to-day of the doctrine, or rather promise, held out in the hymn beginning "Oh what the joy and the glory must be, Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see,"which used to be a hymn often sung in nurseries twenty and thirty years ago? The writer remembers repeating

"There dawns no Sabbath, no Sabbath is o'er," without feeling any profound conviction that the children for whom "no Sabbath is o'er" were to be envied, and doubting whether "truly-Jerusalem," which is the name the hymn gives to that "shore," was a place to be desired. Still, doubts of that kind, often never expressed at all, would probably only be expressed in any case to a nurse, since the sudden presence The Spectator.

of a parent in the nursery dispelled all because The mother, she gloom. brought brightness into the nursery, would not often hear sad questions; the nurse would forget them,-and after all, the mother who only heard happy questions would still be able to put on paper a true picture of a child's mind. But the doubts, even if not laughable, would be interesting.

The centenary of Hans Christian Andersen on April 2nd will be celebrated by various publications and festivities in Odense, his place of birth, and Copenhagen. The Danish poet Holger Drachmann has written a short play for the occasion.

The autobiography of Mr. Andrew D. White, formerly United States ambassador at St. Petersburg and Berlin, will be published by the Macmillan Co. this spring. It will be issued in two volumes, with numerous photogravure portraits and will include sketches of many European rulers and statesmen.

A delightful volume is that in which Houghton, Mifflin & Co. present a complete account of the anniversary proceedings on the occasion of the celebration of the Hawthorne Centenary last July at Hawthorne's Concord home "The Wayside." The addresses and papers which were delivered or read upon that occasion were of more than ordinary interest, for they were largely reminiscent in character and embodied the affectionate recollections of those who knew Hawthorne intimately. To those who participated in the observances and to the multitude of Hawthorne-lovers who could not, this vol

ume will be very welcome, the more so because of the fine portrait, and the views of Hawthorne's Concord haunts with which it is illustrated.

Mr. Methuen, the English publisher, is reviving the old art of pamphleteering. His pamphlet on the Boer war had a large sale while that struggle was in progress, and now he enters the lists with an attack on Mr. Chamberlain's fiscal policy, entitled "England's Ruin: Discussed in Sixteen Letters to the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P." The letters are described as "the simple comment of a plain man on the practical issues of a policy." They are addressed to Mr. Chamberlain not because the author believes they will be read by him, but because it is only through his personality that they can reach the man in the street.

The choice library of M. E. Dagnin, formerly President of the Tribunal of Commerce, was recently dispersed at the Hôtel Drouot, and realized a total of about 235,000 francs. The most important item was carried off by an English bookseller, a copy of "Lea Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé," by Longus, 1718, known as the "Régent" edition, with twenty-eight

figures by Philippe d'Orléans, engraved by Audran. The value of the copy centred in the beautiful mosaic binding by Monnier, of whose work it is regarded as the masterpiece. M. Dagnin bought this volume about twenty-five years ago for 5,500 fr., and the expert, M. Durel, expected that it would fetch about 20,000 fr. It fell, however, to Mr. Bernard Quaritch at 45,500 fr. in competition with M. Th. Belin, the well-known Paris bookseller.

The London County Council has expressed a willingness to grant a site for "an adequate Shakespeare monument," and on the strength of this promise a Provisional Committee has been formed, with Professor Gollancz as its honorary secretary. The committee's aim is not confined to the monument. They would rather aim at the establishment of a great Shakespeare House, to be devoted primarily to the furtherance of the study of the poet's works, and also to serve as a recognized centre for humane learning generally. The "House," it is hoped, will include a Shakespeare library, a lecture-theatre, and a central hall to receive (it is here, the "Academy" remarks, that we begin to be a little nervous) "a fitting statue of Shakespeare, statues of other famous men being added from time to time." The last item is ominous of future strife.

The reissue of Maimonides, "The Guide of the Perplexed" in its English translation and in a popular form is certainly timely in an age which is more than commonly perplexed with religious and theological uncertainties. Walter Jerrold, in The Academy, remarks of the book and its author:

Moses, ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides, flourished over seven hundred years ago, having been born at Cordova in 1135. Few of his works have been translated into Eng

lish, and "The Guide of the Perplexed" was not translated until 1881-85, when Dr. M. Friedländer's version was issued by the Society of Hebrew Literature. The object of the work is "to afford a guide for the perplexed (to thinkers whose studies have brought them into collision with religion), who have studied philosophy and have acquired sound knowledge, and who, while firm in religious matters, are perplexed and bewildered on account of the ambiguous and figurative expressions employed in the holy writings."

The committee nominated to undertake the management of the Leslie Stephen memorial scheme has now accomplished its task. Mr. Sidney Lee, the treasurer, has received from 211 contributors subscriptions to the amount of £769 128. £132 of this sum has been spent on a photogravure of Sir Leslie Stephen by G. F. Watts, R.A., framed copies of which have been presented to the Atheneum Club, the London Library, Trinity Hall, the Working Men's College and Harvard University, with all of which institutions the late Sir Leslie Stephen was intimately connected; unframed prints have been presented to the Trustees of the British Museum and the National Gallery and to 135 subscribers. The residue, amounting to £630, has been offered to the University of Cambridge for the foundation of a Leslie Stephen Lectureship in Literature on the model of the Rede Lectureship. The University has accepted the offer.

Apropos of the Hans Christian Andersen centenary, Walter Jerrold remarks:

During the past fifteen years there have been at least three dozen "selections" or "collections" of Andersen's stories issued-sufficient proof of the steadiness of his popularity. About twenty years ago, Andersen's "Works" were issued in an American edition of ten volumes, but I know of no English edition of such a character. Some of his writings other than the fairy-stories

should repay republication-“In Spain” or "In Sweden," to mention two of his pleasant books of travel talk. "The True Story of my Life" is a delightful piece of autobiography, though it only Ideals with his earlier years-he lived until 1875. This has been twice translated-by Mary Howitt (1846) and by Dr. Spillan, A.M. of Trinity College, Dublin (1852)—and there must be many lovers of Andersen who would be glad of a reissue. Readers who would know something of his later years may be interested in "Hans Christian Andersen's Correspondence with the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Charles Dickens, &c.," selected and edited by F. Crawford (1891).

The sixth volume of the series of annotated reprints of "Early Western Travels" of which Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites is the general editor, and the Arthur H. Clark Company of Cleveland the publishers, contains Henry Marie Brackenridge's Journal of a Voyage up the river Missouri, in 1811, and Gabriel Franchère's Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813 and 1814. These travels were practically synchronous, although the one traveller visited and described the heart of the continent, and the other was an historian of the Astor expedition to the mouth of the Columbia, of which Washington Irving gave so picturesque an account in his "Astoria." Irving wrote purely as an historian: Franchère had the advantage of witnessing and sharing in the adventures which he describes. He told his story simply and directly, yet with something of the Gallic joyousness and vivacity. The translation is by Mr. J. V. Huntington.

The Academy is of the opinion that the publication of the "unique" unfinished novel by Lord Beaconsfield should burst the Disraeli bubble. It adds sharply:

man; but an old and ailing man who had ever possessed a genuine literary gift could never have produced such chapters as these. Disraeli (there is no concealing the fact) was a vulgar writer. His vulgarity is too clever to be gross, his social experience too great to leave it unvarnished; but it peeps out not only in his general attitude towards the aristocracy, but in the very form and diction of his sentences. Some faint interest may be roused by the question who Joseph Toplady Falconet was meant for. The name contains the same number of letters as William Ewart Gladstone, and Gladstone, shortly before Disraeli's death, had put "Rock of Ages" into Latin verse: on the other hand, Macaulay, too, came from Clapham Common and had belonged to the Clapham sect. We should prefer to believe that Macaulay was the man, for the publication of these unfinished chapters would be less welcome than ever if they proved Disraeli to have been making "copy" of that kind out of a still living political opponent.

The "Flowers of Song" which Mr. Frederic Rowland Marvin has gathered from many lands and translated into English verse are chosen with a catholic taste and rendered with delicacy and grace. They are taken from the classics, from the Persian, Sanscrit and Japanese, and from the Italian, German, French, Spanish and other European languages; and their themes are not less varied than their sources. But they have the human note, and the sentiments and reflections, gay and grave, which they express, voice a universal human experience which places them at no great remove from the thought and feeling of to-day. Altogether it is a unique collection, for which readers not a few should thank Mr. Marvin. The book is a product of the dainty typography of the Merry mount Press and it is published by the Pafraets Book Company of Troy, New